Sr. Principal Engineer - Customer Identity - Hybrid - Seattle

A Sr. Principal Engineer at Nordstrom serves as a strategic technical consultant across the entire organization, influencing enterprise-wide architecture and engineering practices. This role influences design trade-off decisions company-wide, solves complex endemic problems, identifies industry trends for implementation, and ensures all engineering solutions are exemplary in terms of robustness, stability, scalability, and cost-effectiveness. The Sr. Principal Engineer represents the highest level of technical individual contributor in their organization, who shapes Nordstrom's technology landscape while maintaining a holistic "One Nordstrom" perspective. 

We are seeking an experienced Sr. Principal Engineer to oversee the maturation of our customer identity ecosystem and establish a cohesive view of customers across all touchpoints of the customer lifecycle. In this pivotal leadership role, you will develop technical approaches that enable seamless customer experiences from anonymous browsing to loyal account holders, designing scalable architectures that connect our digital and physical channels while maintaining the highest standards of security, privacy, and personalization. As a technical visionary in identity management, you will design frameworks that balance the need for rich customer profiles with privacy standards and regulations, incorporating both declared customer data and inferred characteristics. 

A day in the life of... 

• Lead enterprise-wide customer identity strategy and roadmap, creating a unified approach to recognizing and serving customers across all touchpoints 

• Enhance customer targeting capabilities through improved identity resolution, providing robust identity signals to power greater personalization, segmentation, and marketing automation 

• Ensure identity solutions deliver exceptional customer experiences while aligning with Nordstrom's overall business objectives 

• Design architectures that seamlessly integrate customer data across store, online, and mobile experiences to create a consistent view of each customer 

• Architect a comprehensive trust framework that safeguards customer identities while maintaining friction-free customer experiences through deterministic verification and probabilistic risk assessments 

• Create confidence scoring systems that represent our accuracy level in understanding customer preferences, segment placement, and other key attributes 

• Develop identity observability frameworks and establish standards for system quality, performance metrics, and fraud detection 

• Establish architectural standards for identity management systems, including security, governance, privacy, and compliance mechanisms 

• Serve as the organization's foremost expert on customer data integration, cross-channel recognition patterns, and trust frameworks for digital and physical retail environments 

• Influence cross-organizational design decisions and lead technical reviews for identity initiatives across Nordstrom 

• Mentor engineering teams on customer data integration best practices and foster a culture of customer-centricity across the organization 

You own this if you have... 

• 15+ years of professional experience in software engineering and demonstrated success delivering customer identity solutions at enterprise scale 

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field 

• Demonstrated expertise in designing, implementing, and integrating enterprise-scale customer identity systems, including recognition systems, authentication frameworks, and cross-channel data integration 

• Deep knowledge of identity and access management, customer data platforms, authentication protocols, and privacy-enhancing technologies 

• Experience balancing security requirements with frictionless customer experiences across multiple technology domains 

• Familiarity with regulatory frameworks governing customer data and privacy 

• Demonstrated ability to translate complex business requirements into technical solutions with measurable outcomes 

• History of technical leadership across organizations, including mentoring engineers and influencing technical direction 

• Domain knowledge in retail, e-commerce, or customer experience applications spanning identity resolution, progressive profiling, and personalization 

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